Read Online Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars by Mark Ribowsky - Free Book Online

With their long hair and gleaming guitars, at least the Noble Five had the
look
of a real band—several bands, actually, as Ronnie decreed they change their name tothe Wildcats, the Sons of Satan, Conqueror Worm, the Pretty Ones, My Backyard, and then, in a nod to the oft-seen Hell’s Angels’ tattoo that references the percentage of the population bikers estimate themselves to be, the One Percent. With this last moniker, the band hoped to immunize themselves from being harassed by motorcycle gangs when they played gigs on the back of a flatbed truck in church parking lots. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it didn’t. Says Rossington, “When we started out, people would mess with us ’cause we had long hair. And we’d just say, ‘Fuck you’ and fight.”
    On a regular basis shiners and bloody, swollen lips marked their faces, giving them the tough-guy redneck look they didn’t mind a bit. Image, after all, was important, even at gigs at church socials and school gyms. And in 1968, they were really starting to rock out, with tight, interwoven guitar licks. Collins and Rossington had come to the decision that there would be no lead guitar and no rhythm guitar; the two of them would either alternate leads or double them, an uncommon approach. Burns’s drumming and Junstrom’s bass were tight—“in the pocket,” in musicianspeak—never allowing the beat to stray or become muddled.
    The gigs they played were varied. “We used to play one joint until midnight for kids,” Van Zant once said, “then they turned it into a bottle club, and we’d go until 6 a.m.” Given the many dive bars and hippie hangouts around town where a different band would play every night, there was no paucity of gigs. As if on a carousel, they went round and round, from one joint to another and back again, stopping at the Forest Inn, Comic Book Club, Sugar Bowl, the Still, Skateland, West Tavern, and Little Brown Jug. Though alcohol was prohibited at some of them, the cops would look the other way when a bottle, or case, of Jack or Johnnie was smuggled in. The owners often also owned strip clubs, offering up side benefits for the bands that were worth more than the few bucks they cleared from a set, most of it from passing the hat.
    But the chance to compete with other bands was also worth a lot more. With the competition so fierce, some thievery was inevitable, and the boys of the One Percent were hardly above it. One example marks what is apparently the first-known intersection of the early incarnations of Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers Band. In 1967 at the Comic Book the One Percent opened for Hour Glass, a unit formed in L.A. by Duaneand Gregg Allman from the remnants of their first group, the Allman Joys, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Hour Glass was short-lived, the last false step before the formation of the Allman Brothers Band, but they did cut two albums for Liberty Records at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, the first of which
(Hour Glass)
had been released by the time they came through Jacksonville on tour.
    Looking for any clues that might get them the same success, the One Percent went beyond mere study; while Van Zant’s band was on stage, they thought nothing of performing all the songs on
Hour Glass
. What was more shocking than the bald theft was that, according to the Hour Glass’s keyboard player Paul Hornsby—who later was in Grinderswitch and produced top-selling albums by the Charlie Daniels Band, the Marshall Tucker Band, and Wet Willie—“They played it as good or better than we played it.” What’s more, with his typical honey-coated bullshit, Van Zant smoothed it over with sweet talk.
    â€œMan, I gotta tell you,” he said to Hornsby, “we
worship
you guys!”
    Nor did the Allman boys press the point, possibly because they too knew of Ronnie’s reputation. As Hornsby remembers it, Duane and Gregg